Retired Russian police officer Dmitry Pavlyuchenkov has been charged in connection with the 2006 murder of the investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya.

The authorities also named a convicted criminal, Lom-Ali Gaitukayev, as an organiser of the killing.

The agency investigating Politkovskaya's murder said Gaitukayev's murder gang included his nephews - brothers Rustam, Dzhabrail and Ibragim Makhmudov - along with Pavlyuchenkov and another former police officer, Sergei Khadzhikurbanov.

It announced that Lieutenant Colonel Pavlyuchenkov, then head of surveillance at Moscow's main internal affairs directorate, ordered his subordinates to follow the journalist to identify her schedule and commuting routes, and then shared the information with the other members of the gang.

The colonel later passed the murder weapon from Gaitukayev to the suspected gunman, Rustam Makhmudov.

Gaitukayev is currently serving a lengthy jail term on unrelated charges of attempted murder, according to the BBC Russian service. Rustam Makhmudov was arrested in May and charged in early June.

Politkovskaya, a special correspondent for the Moscow-based paper Novaya Gazeta, was well known for her investigative reports on human rights abuses in Chechnya, stories that led to multiple threats on her life.

During her career, she was threatened, jailed, forced into exile and poisoned. On 7 October 2006, a man in a baseball cap shot her dead in the elevator of her Moscow apartment block.